This is the next post on first principles and my attempt to understand them. Some of the terms are introduced in the previous posts, Nature, Nurture, and Niceties, What the Hell Are First Principles?, A Fundamental Truth, and A Fundamental Belief if you care to give those a read.
I think of myself as a pretty good cook, but what separates a cook from a chef? When we run out of ingredients, a cook like me rushes off to the store. A chef, on the other hand, understands the principles well enough to improvise.
A chef can whip up a cake from scratch—flour, sugar, butter—creating something worthy of Michelin Stars. But when the zombie apocalypse comes, they can also adjust on the fly, tweak the recipe, or create something entirely new. They understand how ingredients interact—salt, fat, acid, heat—how chemicals react to make a dough rise, and the temperature required to create the ideal Maillard reaction.
A cook, a lesser cook than even me, cracks open some premade dough and slaps it on a cookie sheet. In a pinch, it works. But the curious mind can’t stand for cut-and-bake cookies. The continuous learner needs to understand how and what and why, using that knowledge, those truths, to create something more valuable.
The chef’s cooking sings. It’s resilient. Adaptable. This is playing with principles.
Under My Roof
This chef vs. cook thinking shows up everywhere—especially in rambling blog post, but also in parenting. A topic that is chock-full of tactics and techniques, but principles? Those are rare.
“Under my roof, we do it my way!”
But what is the goal of parenting? Is it compliance? Passing down your way of doing things, etched in stone for Flynn after Flynn, generation after generation?
Not at all.
The real aim is love, shared experience, and contribution. With that, you shape little humans who grow into full-blown adults—ones who can wayfind on their own, navigating by the stars instead of needing turn-by-turn instructions.
As Maui told Moana, wayfinding is “not just sails and knots, it’s seeing where you’re going in your mind. Knowing where you are, by knowing where you’ve been.”
Recipe: “Take a left, go two blocks, take a right—it’s past the dumpy house on the corner.”
Principle: “The north star is thataway!”
Which will stand the test of time?
Noah’s Ark & Wayfinding
Even religion illustrates this divide between following recipes and understanding principles. It offers distilled wisdom, a recipe for success, and many of the principles hold true. But since they stopped distilling 2,000 years ago, some lessons—like the Earth being created in six days—have been challenged by scientific evidence.
The story of Noah’s Ark, a global catastrophic flood was taken literally for many generations. Other cultures, from Mesopotamia to the Aztecs told similar tales. That makes me think we had some pretty big floods way back when. But more likely than a global event is a regional catastrophe, like the flooding of the Black Sea around 5600 BCE.
It wasn’t a flooding of the whole world; it was a flooding of their whole world, and directions home were hard to come by.
The ancient view of the sky describes a solid “firmament,” a dome, with the stars fixed upon it like lights hung on a ceiling. But wayfinders don’t just aim for a fixed position, a star at a single point in time—they follow the stars, using the rising and setting patterns, proximity of constellations across the open sky. Astronomers have shown the sky is no dome, but an atmosphere, with stars as distant suns in a vast universe.
The Cook reads these texts and sees no other truth. Build the boat, grab two of everything, and batten down the hatches.
The Chef understands the principles: resilience, renewal, preparation. To find their way home, to find a new home, will require wayfinding.
Best practices age, but principles endure. Parenting is about teaching principles, fundamental truths and beliefs, that last. Creating little chefs.
But chefs have a way of pissing people off. They’re polarizing. They challenge conventional wisdom, especially the unwise kind.
Cut-And-Bake Cookies
If you’ve been living your life making cut-and-bake cookies, feeding them to a starving crowd, you might start thinking you’re a chef.
Success. Admiration. Power.
But then a real chef comes along, decodes the whole endeavor for what it is, unmasks the frauds like a Scooby-Doo villain, and well, that’s a real ego hit. For the cooks and their consumers.
“A frog in a well knows nothing of the sea.”
The secret, don’t confuse that echo for the ocean.
Netflix & Project Griffin
The business world is full of this same dynamic. When Reed Hastings started Netflix, he didn’t tweak the video rental game—he broke it. Founded just a few years after Amazon, and leveraging the same principle: the elimination of physical constraints.
People want entertainment, convenience, and choice. They don’t want to arrive on a Friday night only to find that all 37 copies of Terminator 2 are already taken. Revenge of the Nerds, again!?!
Blockbuster had 9,000 locations operating with that recipe. Their slogan was “The movies you want for less,” but amongst my family, they were known for late fees, rewind charges, and being out of what you wanted.
Hastings saw the truth. He put on his chef’s hat and wrote a new recipe. Subscriptions, mail order, queues, no due dates, and all from the comfort of your living room. Blockbuster ignored the fundamental truth and squeezed their business for all it was worth.
Netflix fumbled the ball when streaming took off. They rebranded their services, splitting into Netflix for streaming and Qwikster for DVD rentals. This was a bad look and sent their stock tumbling. But it was aligned with one of their fundamental beliefs: experimentation.
Chefs can experiment and fail too, but when they do, they can course correct.
“The north star is thataway!”
When a product launch bombs, it’s easy to pivot, because you know a change is needed. But what about a product that people love?
As streaming took off, Netflix no longer needed warehouses full of DVDs, iconic red envelopes, or USPS. What they needed was Project Griffin. In the early days of streaming, smart TVs were a novelty. How would Netflix scale their streaming business if people couldn’t get Friends onto their TVs? They needed a delivery mechanism.
Netflix worked to solve that problem with a little streaming device. But just as Project Griffin was getting ready to launch, Hastings abandoned it. Why? Because it ran counter to their fundamental truth. It was inserting a physical product into a digital ecosystem, and their goal was to remove physical constraints. They wanted to be everywhere, for everyone, on any device.
And that is exactly what they’ve done.
Oh, and maybe you’ve heard of that little streaming device. We love them here at the Flynn house. In 2008, they spun out Project Griffin into Roku, Inc.
Course correction isn’t just for failures, it’s a way to pivot from low leverage to high leverage. Making that pivot is easier if you can do more than follow a recipe.
The Bleepin’ Eggs
But let’s get back to the kitchen for a moment, because this is where the chef vs. cook difference becomes most obvious. I’m no chef, but I’ve made my fair share of cookies.
I’ll play fast and loose with some salted butter. I might even grow a pair and toss in milk chocolate morsels instead of the semi-sweet, but I’m still just a cook (with chef aspirations).
Now, this would never happen at my house, but just for example, let’s say you started making cookies. You were following the directions carefully, but there is one very important instruction that is left out of most recipes.
*Before you start, make sure you have all the ingredients.*
But, acting on instinct, you proceed without taking that important step. The dry ingredients were carefully measured and whisked. The butter creamed, the sugar added, and then it hits you. No eggs. Where the hell are the bleepin’ eggs? We just had a fresh dozen!
Can’t make cookies without eggs, so you send the boy next door to Lolly’s place. She might have an egg or two.
Strike two, Lolly is fresh out.
So you head to Safeway, but they are sold out. The shelf is empty except for, strangely, some hard-boiled eggs. Another bird flu outbreak has created a shortage.
You shake your fist and curse the President. Where the hell are the bleepin’ eggs! Your mind is racing.
Should have gotten your own chickens.
You hop back in the car and make way for home, to disappointed kids, to wasted ingredients. All the time you spent watching Yan Can Cook on PBS made you nothing more than a bleepin’ cook. SAD!
Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto, in this very same situation, after cursing the President for bird flu and eggflation, would get busy chefing.
“We’ll use flax seeds,” he’d say. Not because he is vegan, but because it works.
What we need from the egg is not a supportive mother hen—we need a binding agent and emulsifier that can provide structure while retaining moisture. Surely the egg isn’t the only thing on God’s green earth that can provide structure and moisture.
The chef and the cook have a complex relationship. Idolized, villainized, and chastised, for their way of thinking.
Causing Trouble & Solving Problems
This chef mentality—the drive to understand how things really work—shows up in all kinds of unexpected places. Chefs cause all sorts of trouble, and they solve all sorts of problems. Kids that take the alarm clock apart just to see how it works? Chefs. How about the kids who built bombs? Chefs as well.
Peter Thiel noted in Zero to One, “Of the six people who started PayPal, four had built bombs in high school.”
Without checking for ten fingers, can you guess who the bomb builder’s chefs are? From David Sacks, Elon Musk, Ken Howery, Luke Nosek, Peter Thiel, and Reid Hoffman, just Sacks and Hoffman steered clear of explosives. Maybe they have more in common than people think.
I’m a reformed bomb builder myself. That’s probably why I’m so much fun at parties. But truth be told, the world needs Chefs and Cooks, we’ve got room for both, just like PayPal did.
Even more than the skills, we need the honesty.
Anthony Bourdain was a chef, but he was better in media than he was in the kitchen. And when he published Kitchen Confidential, he became the most hated chef in the world. And the most revered. The establishment didn’t want you to know that Sunday’s seafood special had been festering in the walk-in for a week. They didn’t want you to know what was going on behind those swinging doors. The drugs that fueled the industry, the chaos bubbling under the surface, the chain of events that got that Chicken Cordon Bleu on your plate.
Bourdain kicked the doors in.
And while some were outraged, more were intrigued. Kitchen Confidential was part of a movement. It changed the image of the chef. Tattoos, cussing, experimentation, and celebrity followed. He let people see what was really going on, and it unleashed another level in cuisine, beyond the French training of his predecessors. No longer was fine dining just beef Wellington and shrimp cocktail. Duck à l’Orange was out, confit was in. Molten chocolate lava cake was out, frozen chocolate spheres were in. Kitchens were being infused by tanks of liquid nitrogen and the imagination of a new generation.
True chefs, even those that were dragged kicking and screaming to adapt to these new techniques, could see the genius.
The cooks though—those that had built empires in the 70s and 80s by following a recipe, only to have the curtain pulled back—didn’t appreciate what was happening. Their careers were not based on principles as much as status. And they enjoyed their status.
Bourdain’s bedside manor was lacking. And when industry veterans tried to strike him down, they did the opposite, and made him more powerful than they could possibly imagine.
People want to see what’s happening behind closed doors. They want transparency. It’s human nature. And human nature is what we’ll jump to in the next part of our series on first principles.
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